l.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures
without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged
pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well;
and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always
hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching
for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be
ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked
in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves,
but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it
warmed with their contact:--John Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in
England--saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the
handsomest man in all the land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old
and savage--leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line
of a ballad, "And a winning tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is
n't looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just
as of old when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our
grandmother to listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.

Ah, dear me! We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating
man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the
second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by our own
hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the exercise is
easy. But when we come to real life, the poker is in the fore, and, ten
to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to hold;--lucky for
us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to leave the skin of our
hands sticking to it when we fling it down or drop it with a loud or
silent cry!

--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human character
and feeling I am winding. I meant to tell my thoughts, and to throw in
a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured themselves for
me from day to day. Chance has thrown together at the table with me a
number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean not only to look
on them, but, if I can, through them. You can get any man's or woman's
secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your own, if you will only look
patiently on them long enough. Nature is always applying her reagents
to character, if you will take the pains to watch her. Our studies
of character, to change the image, are v